NOTE to fined and sus pended Jets safety Eric Smith: You’re right; you were scapegoated by the NFL for that collision of circumstances, that helmet-to-helmet hit that left Cardinals wide receiver Anquan Boldin down and out.

Heck, if Boldin hadn’t been hurt, Smith might’ve won “Defensive Player of the Week” – as awarded by the NFL Network.

If Smith, who was suspended for one game, for were to tune to the league’s own network, he would see the week’s most purposefully brutal hits daily presented as featured fun. There’s even something that the NFL Network happily headlines, “Hit Parade.” Friday, it included at least two helmet jobs.

While good, clean tackles seem to seldom appear, the NFL Network is eager to showcase players being needlessly chest-rolled after they’re tackled, or hurled out of bounds when a mere shove would have done the job. Such clips are provided as examples of especially good defensive play.

Same goes for excessive showboating, the kind the NFL often, but not always, flags. The NFL Network takes care to include lots of those fun clips, too.

And players headed for the end zone who slow down to rub it in, high-step, taunt and otherwise preen? They’re locks to be included in NFL Network video reels.

In a half-hour Friday morning, the NFL Network was pleased to present about 20 clips of plays featuring acts that were far more ill-intended than what took place between Boldin and Smith.

Troy Aikman, frequent sufferer of concussions, said it well a few years ago: What the NFL condemns is the same thing the NFL sells.

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Chip Caray, TBS’s lead MLB play-by-player, drove us nuts throughout the ALCS. He either has a strange sense of baseball or he enjoys confusing/butchering simple issues through needless embellishments.

For example, instead of telling us that the starting pitcher, in the fifth or sixth inning, has retired nine straight, he tells us, “Nine up, nine down,” as if the pitcher is throwing a no-hitter.

During Game 5, Rays’ catcher Dioner Navarro fouled off a pitch before taking strike two. Caray might have said, “Taken for strike two.” Instead he said, “Navarro took that for a second strike call,” as if he hadn’t yet swung.

And almost every base on balls, according to Caray, was the result of the batter having “coaxed a walk,” as if not swinging at balls out of the strike zone were part of some cunning plan.

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Leave it to Nike to produce a commercial showing a kid jumping off a couch, landing on a coffee table, smashing that table to bits. Yeah, baby, just do it.

From reader Chris O’Connor of Ballston Spa, N.Y.: Instead of encouraging viewers to turn off their house lights to conserve energy during postseason telecasts, why doesn’t TBS encourage MLB to schedule more weekend afternoon postseason games? Now that would conserve energy, and on both ends.

Ex-Ranger and longtime Sabre Matthew Barnaby has been hired by ESPN to replace Barry Melrose as the network’s in-studio NHL analyst.

The Fall (Asleep) Classic: We’ve received a pile of missives from readers and devoted baseball fans in Florida and New England who can’t wait to get up every morning – to find out who won the Red Sox-Rays ALCS game. You’re doing a great job, Commissioner (Bud) Selig.

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Over the first six years of his presence on CBS’s NFL pregame show, Boomer Esiason was the voice of no tolerance for the misconduct of players. He would be sure to stress that such players are supposed to be professionals.

Stood to reason. Esiason, after all, quarterbacked a Bengals’ team that, the night before it played in Super Bowl XXIII, lost FB/blocking back Stanley Wilson to a cocaine binge.

Remarkably, though, this year on CBS, Esiason has done a 180. In Week 1 he knocked the Panthers for suspending WR Steve Smith for breaking the nose of teammate Ken Lucas with a sucker punch. Esiason claimed that Smith only should have been fined because he’s too valuable to be suspended.

Last Sunday, Esiason said too much was being made of Adam “Pacman” Jones‘ latest episode, a hassle with one of the bodyguards assigned to keep Jones far from trouble. Esiason reasoned, “This is nothing more than a child going after the baby sitter.” The child, in this case, is 25 years old and comes wrapped in a rap sheet.

Such a sudden, radical shift in outlook is highly suspicious. Perhaps, now that Esiason must daily indulge the antisocial public behavior of his WFAN co-host, Craig Carton, such an indulgence must be extended to all.

How would it otherwise look if he took the high road on CBS and the low road on CBS-owned WFAN?